I've kept quiet of late over the proposed F-gas revisions because negotiations were at a delicate stage between the Commission, European Council, European Parliament, and the various stakeholders all vying for position. I didn't want to pre-empt anything or be accused of using this blog to unfairly sway opinion. Maybe it's the way I was brought up but I believe in fair play and that the right way forward is to debate out the issues when there are disagreements and that logic will prevail. Unfortunately not all parties under the "stakeholder" umbrella play by the same rules. I did think that manufacturers would at least have actively debated the pros and cons of issues like the pre-charging of air conditioning units.

One manufacturer, while being very outspoken against the proposed ban on pre-charging of non-monoblock units and devoting huge resources to going around Europe under the EPEE banner to lobby very vocally with national authorities, appears to have deliberately avoided any public discussion of the subject.

One of their arguments against the ban was that it would increase production costs because they would need to have two production lines - one for Europe and one for the rest of the world. We have countered that this is nonsense, that they wouldn't manufacture European systems differently, they just wouldn't charge them at the end of the production line.

The glaring double standard though is that all the time they've been publicly peddling the hard luck story about how difficult it is to have two production lines, they've been running two production lines with one producing R410A systems and one producing R32 systems. Amazing how this isn't a barrier to their precious factory procedures when it suits them isn't it?